The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

little puppet show too.
Normally it takes me a day or two to develop a talk. I never speak from notes, but I normally have a
visual presentation and an idea of what I want to say. Not this time. A puppet show would have been
easier. I was paralyzed for weeks over this presentation. Nothing was working.
One evening, about two weeks before the event, Steve asked, “How’s your UP talk coming along?”
I burst into tears. “It’s not coming along. I don’t have shit. I can’t do it. I’m going to have to fake a
car wreck or something.”
Steve sat down next to me and grabbed my hand. “What’s going on? This isn’t like you. I’ve never
seen you unravel like this over a talk. You do these things all the time.”
I buried my head in my hands and mumbled, “I’m blocked. I just can’t stop thinking about this
horrible experience that happened several years ago.”
Steve sounded surprised. “What experience?”
“I never told you about it,” I explained. He leaned toward me and waited.
“Five years ago I bombed a talk like I had never bombed before or since. It was a total disaster, and
I’m so afraid that it’s going to happen again.”
Steve couldn’t believe that I had never told him about my disastrous experience. “What in the hell
happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”
I got up from the table and said, “I don’t want to talk about it. It will just make it worse.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me back to the table. He looked at me in an I’ve-been-waiting-my-
whole-life-to-use-your-line-against-you way. “Don’t we need to talk about the hard things? Doesn’t
talking always make it better?” I was too tired to fight, so I told him this story.
Five years ago, when my first book came out, I was asked to speak at a women’s networking lunch.
I was so excited because, like the UP Experience, I would be speaking to a group of “normal” people
—not therapists or academics—but normal businesspeople. In fact, this event was my first normal
audience group.
I arrived early at the swanky country club where the event was being hosted, and I introduced
myself to the woman in charge. After sizing me up for what felt like an eternity, she greeted me with a
stack of short pronouncements. “Hello. You don’t look like a researcher. I’m going to introduce you.
I need your bio.”
It was an uptight twist on “nice to meet you too,” but okay. I handed her my bio and that was the
beginning of the end.
She read it for thirty seconds before she gasped, turned to me, and peering over her reading
glasses, snapped, “This says that you’re a shame researcher. Is that true?”
All of a sudden, I was ten years old and in the principal’s office. I hung my head and whispered,
“Yes, ma’am. I’m a shame researcher.”
With her lips pursed, she popped, “Do. You. Study. Anything. Else?”
I couldn’t tell her.
“Do. You?” she demanded.
“Yes. I also study fear and vulnerability.”
She shrapsed, which is like a combo shriek and gasp. “I was told that you collected research on
how to be more joyful and how to have more connection and meaning in our lives.”
Ah … got it. She didn’t know anything about me. She must have heard about me from someone who
failed to mention the nature of my work. Now it all made sense.

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I tried to explain, “I don’t really study ‘how-to’ be joyful and have more meaning in our lives. I
know a lot about these topics because I study the things that get in the way of joy, meaning, and
connection.” Without even responding to me, she walked out of the room and left me standing there.
Oh, the irony of a shame researcher standing in a puddle of “I’m not good enough.”
She came back a few minutes later, looked right over the top of my head, and said, “Here’s how this
is going to go:
Number 1: You’re not goi ng to tal k about the thi ngs that get i n the way. You’re goi ng to tal k about the how-to part. That’s what peopl e want to hear. Peopl e want how-to.
Number 2: Do not menti on the word shame. Peopl e wi l l be eati ng.
Number 3: Peopl e want to be comfortabl e and j oyful . That’s al l . Keep i t j oyful and comfortabl e.”
I just stood there in total shock. After a few quiet seconds, she asked, “Okay?” and before I could
say anything, she answered for me, “Sounds good.”
Then, just as she started walking away, she turned around and said, “Light and breezy. People like
light and breezy.” And, just in case I wasn’t clear, she spread her fingers far apart and made huge
sweeping gestures with her hands to illustrate “light” and “breezy” (picture Margaret Thatcher
imitating Bob Fosse).
For forty minutes I stood in front of this group, totally paralyzed and repeating different versions
of, “Joy is good. Happy is so, so good. We should all be joyful. And have meaning. Because they’re
just so darn good.”
The women in the audience just smiled, nodded, and ate their chicken. It was a train wreck.
By the time I ended the story, Steve’s face was all scrunched up and he was shaking his head. He’s
not a big fan of public speaking, so I think he was staving off his own anxiety as he listened to my
disaster story.
But, strangely enough, telling the story made me less anxious. In fact, the second that I finished
telling Steve the story, I felt different. I finally got it. My work—me—the decade I’ve spent doing
research—it’s all about “the things that get in the way.” I’m not about the “how-to” because in ten
years, I’ve never seen any evidence of “how-to” working without talking about the things that get in
the way.
In a very powerful way, owning this story allowed me to claim who I am as a researcher and to
establish my voice. I looked at Steve and smiled. “I don’t do how-to.”
For the first time in five years, I realized that the country club woman wasn’t out to get me and
sabotage my talk. If that were the case, her ridiculous parameters wouldn’t have been so devastating to
me. Her list was symptomatic of our cultural fears. We don’t want to be uncomfortable. We want a
quick and dirty “how-to” list for happiness.
I don’t fit that bill. Never have. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to skip over the hard stuff, but it just
doesn’t work. We don’t change, we don’t grow, and we don’t move forward without the work. If we
really want to live a joyful, connected, and meaningful life, we must talk about things that get in the
way.
Until I owned and spoke this story, I let my lack of “quick tips” and “five simple steps” get in the
way of my professional worthiness. Now that I’ve claimed that story, I see that my understanding of
the darkness gives my search for the light context and meaning.
I’m happy to report that The UP Experience went really well. I actually told this “Light and Breezy”
story as my talk. It was a risk, but I figured that even C-suites struggle with worthiness. A couple of
weeks after the event, I got a call from the organizer. She said, “Congratulations! The evaluations are

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in and your talk finished in the top two of the day, and given what you study, you were the dark horse
going in.”
Here’s the bottom line:
If we want to live and love with our whole hearts, and if we want to engage with the world from a place of worthiness, we have to talk about the things that get in the way—especially shame, fear, and vulnerability.
In Jungian circles, shame is often referred to as the swampland of the soul. I’m not suggesting that
we wade out into the swamp and set up camp. I’ve done that and I can tell you that the swampland of
the soul is an important place to visit, but you would not want to live there.
What I’m proposing is that we learn how to wade through it. We need to see that standing on the
shore and catastrophisizing about what could happen if we talked honestly about our fears is actually
more painful than grabbing the hand of a trusted companion and crossing the swamp. And, most
important, we need to learn why constantly trying to maintain our footing on the shifting shore as we
gaze across to the other side of the swamp—where our worthiness waits for us—is much harder work
than trudging across.
“How-to” is a seductive shortcut, and I understand that. Why cross the swamp if you can just bypass
it?
But here’s the dilemma: Why is “how-to” so alluring when, truthfully, we already know “how to”
yet we’re still standing in the same place longing for more joy, connection, and meaning?
Most everyone reading this book knows how to eat healthy. I can tell you the Weight Watcher points
for every food in the grocery store. I can recite the South Beach Phase I grocery shopping list and the
glycemic index like they’re the Pledge of Allegiance. We know how to eat healthy.
We also know how to make good choices with our money. We know how to take care of our
emotional needs. We know all of this, yet …